UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — John Mauro, Dorothy Pate Enright Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, has been named head of Penn State’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, effective July 1. Mauro will succeed Susan Sinnott, who has served as the head of the department since 2015.
“I feel truly honored and excited at this opportunity to lead the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Penn State,” Mauro said. “I am very grateful to my colleagues for the trust they’ve placed in me and to Susan Sinnott for her outstanding leadership over the past 10 years.”
Mauro, who joined the Penn State faculty in 2017, is an internationally recognized materials and glass science expert and co-inventor of LionGlass. Prior to joining Penn State, Mauro worked for 18 years as an industrial research scientist at Corning Incorporated, where he was co-inventor of three iterations of Corning Gorilla Glass, a thin, durable, touch sensitive cover glass that has been used in billions of cellphones, tablets and touch-screen devices worldwide.
“Given his amazing research accomplishments and current work on LionGlass, it is particularly gratifying that Professor Mauro is willing and eager to serve the students, faculty and staff in this important leadership role,” said Lee Kump, the John Leone Dean in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences.
Mauro serves as the chair of Penn State’s Intercollege Graduate Degree Program in Materials Science and Engineering and associate head for graduate education in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences’ (EMS) Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
"John hit the ground running when he joined the department by writing two textbooks, revitalizing our classes on glass and kinetics, supervising the work of a small army of students and postdocs, publishing many papers in peer-reviewed journals, filing patents — including for the now famous LionGlass material — and excelling in service to the department and the profession,” said Susan Sinnott, current head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Everything that he does is of exceptional quality and I expect the same in this new role.”
Mauro is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society, the Society of Glass Technology and the National Academy of Inventors. He is an elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering and an elected academician in the World Academy of Ceramics.
Mauro is the author of more than 380 peer-reviewed publications and is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society. He is co-author of "Fundamentals of Inorganic Glasses," the definitive textbook on glass science and technology, and author of the textbook published in 2021, "Materials Kinetics: Transport and Rate Phenomena."
Mauro was awarded the University’s Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in 2021 and the EMS Paul F. Robertson Award for Research Breakthrough of the Year in 2020 for his pioneering work in decoding the “glass genome” — the code to design new functional glasses. He also was awarded the Wilson Award for Excellence in Teaching from EMS in 2022.
Mauro earned a bachelor of science degree in glass engineering science and a bachelor of arts in computer science, both in 2001, and a doctorate in glass science in 2006, all from Alfred University.